Two days into the jungle on the road to Arn Griishank, Kenbro is what the locals call a “Zealot Village” – a settlement of KemerLexi devouts who took the isolation and the inclement Green Hell weather as a penance willingly worn. Travellers passing through are warned, cheerfully enough, to just go along with what the villagers practice and they’ll be fine. The Agents went along with it. It still cost the village three dead by morning.
The Kenbro Inn covers the night itself – the storm, the assassin vine, Avon’s death and what came out of his chest afterward. This file covers the village around it: the people who live there, what they believe explains their “accidents,” and what Section 18 has since worked out actually caused them.
FILE NOTES
The saloon’s barkeep, a rough-looking man everyone calls Ceph – short for Bucephalus, and no relation to the Section House cemetery groundskeeper of the same name – runs the only bar in town with the flat, practised calm of someone who has done this before. When a ten-year-old boy named Damien was tied to a chair in the corner, wrists already bleeding from the cord, Ceph waved it off without much concern: “he gets a little worked up when the storms come… but you know, it was just an accident.” The accident in question was Damien killing his own sister during a previous storm. The village forgave him for it the same way it forgives everyone – instantly, and without much discussion.
That forgiveness runs all the way up. The village priest, Johaness, presided over the funeral for Kenbro’s latest dead with real grief, breaking down more than once mid-service – despite being, by every account the Agents could piece together, the direct cause of some of those same deaths. The congregation stood beside the man who’d killed people they loved and held him in exactly the same regard as before. KemerLexi’s followers file every “accident” under the same heading: another trial of their self-imposed isolation, endured rather than explained.
Bert and Mary, a village couple who sheltered two of the Agents at crossbow-point until they were sure who was knocking, were considerably less sentimental about it once the storm passed. “We’d better clear up the mess… so many accidents,” Bert said, already reaching for the axe and shovels, before cracking open a dead dog’s skull to check for the telltale mass of worms nesting around its brain. He didn’t find them in the dog. He did in a corpse.
The three miners at the center of that night – Avon, Delta, and Kade – weren’t villagers at all, just travellers who’d stolen the wrong thing from a Dranathess patrol: a heavy obsidian flask, marked in symbols reading roughly “corrosive, sentient, danger,” that they’d mistaken for an elixir of longevity. It held a very young black pudding instead. Delta died on Raven’s blade in the panic; Kade was gutted and partially eaten by the transformed Dranathess soldier sent to retrieve it; Avon carried the pudding’s spawn inside him back to the saloon, where it finished the job from the inside out.
“Oh don’t worry about him – he gets a little worked up when the storms come… but you know, it was just an accident.”
Ceph, the Kenbro Saloon barkeep, on Damien
What actually causes the “accidents” took Section 18 considerably longer to untangle than it took the villagers to shrug them off: a parasite, riding in tiny worms, that migrates toward the brain and triggers violent psychosis specifically when exposed to lightning – the glow, or possibly the sound, nobody’s pinned down which. The village always assumed it was simply the weather, and simply KemerLexi’s will. The truth on file is worse. The worms were introduced deliberately, seeded into Kenbro’s food or water supply as part of Kaleb’s wider research, and triggered from a distance using an artifact from his own collection – the Orb of Storms, capable of casting control weather on demand. Kenbro was never cursed. It was a test site.
STATUS: Filed under Locations, Green Hell. The village never learned any of this, and by the time the Agents left – taking the parting signpost, “Kenbro – we hope your visit was pleasant,” as something closer to a keepsake than a joke – there was no clean way to tell them.